Mulayam, man who paved the way for Vajpayee return to power

In the phalanx of socialist provincial players who turned into regional hegemons overnight, courtesy the VP Singh & Mandal Commission phenomenon, Mulayam Singh Yadav stood apart, as much for his politics as for his craft. He learnt these in rugged Chambal and amidst the rough and tumble of the 1970s’ fledgling anti-Congress churn. His cunning mind was made of contrasts and contradictions, with ‘self-interest first’ as the credo. Confronting BJP in Ayodhya: By the late 1980s ‘Netaji’ broke through as a foremost protagonist of OBC assertion. Then, along with Bihar’s Lalu Prasad, he formed a twosome whose belligerent confrontation of the Ayodhya agitation and BJP upstaged a dazed Congress, reducing that once invincible party to a rump in the cowbelt. These initiatives also turned him into the presiding deity of the ‘secular’ pantheon and a key arbiter of Muslim politics. Rising amidst the Mandal turbulence: He was a polarising figure for the urban-upper-caste-elite bloc but lauded as an emancipator by many of the dispossessed. His disdain for accusatory mainstream voices as the echo of caste-class status quo kept his eyes on the money. He did not flinch from twisting the knife by pitchforking Phoolan Devi into Parliament. Some saw this as a cynical mobilisational trick, but the ‘most backwards’ got the boost they had been yearning for. It was Mandal at its apogee. But the Yadav chieftain is too complex a beast to be understood by this big picture alone. As a wrestler who finessed feints and knockout ‘charkha daav’ in the remorseless akhadas of the Yadav heartland, his political flips were primarily driven by self-preservation. His slipperiness got the ultimate tribute from natural ally Prakash Karat who dubbed him plain ‘unreliable’. Then shape-shifting to accommodate Vajpayee: Imagine, when the ‘communal’ Vajpayee government fell in 1999, ‘secular bulwark’ Mulayam broke from fellow travellers and refused to back Congress. The man celebrated for fighting BJP, single-handedly paved the way for PM Vajpayee’s return. Mulayam was actually fine with BJP, since he was paranoid about Congress revival. The shapeshifter from Saifai had rusticity wrapped around pragmatism, and he always kept enough wiggle room in ideological dogmas. His ideological twists hurt Mayawati twice: In 1995, her decision to break alliance with SP that was formed to thwart the post-demolition BJP, had her attacked by CM Mulayam’s henchmen. And, when in 2003, BJP brought down ally CM Mayawati, Netaji enlisted Team Vajpayee’s support to break up the Dalit outfit to gain power. The sight of how SP set up shop in the central hall of the assembly, to wait for MLAs to trickle in from far-flung areas, and how saffron speaker KN Tripathi treated defections in instalments over days as a one-third split in BSP, is a tale for a tome. Tripathi continued as speaker under Mulayam, till it became embarrassing for both. The manoeuvrer who deftly drove with both his left and right hands maintained relationships across the aisle. To ‘Atalji’, he was deferential, to the point of being reverential. His hidden liaison with Hindutva mascot Kalyan Singh at the peak of their rivalry was spoken about in hushed tones even as he worked with many Congress stalwarts. Much later, the sight of his glad-handing PM Modi made many allies squirm. With the passage of time Mulayam mellowed: He sought a line with the middle classes and the corporate world, with the controversial Amar Singh and Big B as the bridge. He even rescued the Manmohan Singh government in 2008 in a desperate lunge for power, but a still 1999-smarting Congress used him and junked him in short order. Today SP represents a post-Mandal phase: It has fallen short after rising with the promise of upliftment. The emergence of exclusive and assertive OBC platforms decimated the subservience of backwards to forwards which, in conjunction with the rise of BSP, inverted the pyramid in an overnight swoop. But the party failed to move from ‘self-respect’ to the next step in the ladder, ‘development’, even as the umbrella ‘OBC’ slowly revealed itself as ‘Yadav hegemony’. These twin grievances are at the roots of the present political fragmentation of backwards and the sub-categorisation demands. And the stigma of ‘crime’ was such that in 2007, Mayawati rode to office on the iconic war cry: “Chad gundon ki chhati pe, button dabao haathi pe.” This is what sets the ‘caste-plus’ south, with its Karunanidhis, Moilys, Siddaramaiahs, apart from the stagnated north of Mulayams, Lalus, Kalyans. The Hindi hardliner, in hindsight, would have preferred a southern drift.